No one visits Statia for its beaches, which are few in number and undistinguished. The island's best beach for swimming is the usually calm Oranje Beach in Lower Town. Zeelandia Bay on the east coast, which has rough surf and undertows, is not recommended for swimming but nonetheless rates as Statia's second beach. Oranje Beach, at the north end of Lower Town, has gray sands and generally calm waters. Modest as it may be, it's the island's best all-round beach and a popular swimming spot for Statian families.
Statia has a couple dozen dive sites, the majority of which are coral formations on old lava flows. There are also a few wrecks of colonial trading ships, although the remains are basically piles of ballast stones as the ships themselves have disintegrated. To protect the island's historical remains from souvenir hunters, all divers are required to be accompanied by a guide. The Stingray wreck (1768), a few minutes from Lower Town in 15m (50ft) of water, is near a ledge with a rich concentration of marine life, including stingrays, spotted eels and octopuses.
Anchor Reef, at the southwest side of the island, is a popular reef dive with a wide variety of sponges, corals and sea fans. It also has many ledges and crevices harboring lobsters, sea turtles and numerous species of fish. For a deep dive, Doobie Crack, a large cleft in a reef at the northwest side of the island, has black-tip sharks and schools of large fish.
Inexpensive snorkeling tours of some of the shallower reefs are available from the dive shops.
Statia has good hiking, and its most popular trail leads to the rim of the Quill, an extinct volcano. The trail begins in Oranjestad and takes about 50 minutes to reach the edge of the crater. From there you can continue in either direction along the rim. The trail to the southeast takes about 45 minutes and ends atop the 600m (1970ft) Mazinga, Statia's highest point. The shorter Panorama Track to the northeast offers spectacular views and only takes about 15 minutes. A third option is the steep track leading down into the crater, where there's a thick rainforest of tall trees, some with huge buttressed trunks. This track takes about 30 minutes each way.
